SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein

Bakkot · 2016-09-29T03:53:51+00:00

Since this is a post on SSC which is heavy on the culture wars, we are of course not going to enforce the usual confinement of culture war content to the culture war thread.

Nevertheless, please take substantial care to ensure your comments here are positive contributions to the discussion.

ThirteenValleys · 2016-09-29T15:42:32+00:00

I don't like Clinton. I also don't like the Social Justice movement. And it still amazes me the amount of sheer, lizard-people-in-disguise-level power so many conservatives attribute the latter having over the former.

Clinton voted for the Iraq War, didn't publicly support same-sex marriage until 2013, and supported her husband's decidedly non-leftist positions on free trade, prison reform, welfare reform, drug laws, and financial deregulation during her time as first lady. She's the living, breathing example of a career (and careerist) politician, an insider, establishment, whatever word you want to use. Temperamentally (always a tricky metric, of course), she appears somewhere on the spectrum between Tracy Flick and Mrs. Iselin.

And I'm supposed to believe she's just a stooge for the Contemporary American Media Studies Dept. at Kenyon College and for purple-haired 21-year-olds who use the phrase 'micro-aggression' unironically?

There is plenty of left-wing revulsion (not dissatisfaction or resignation; revulsion) out there for Clinton and who she stands for and what she represents. The Democrats just had their biggest, ugliest, most public internal fight for the soul of the party since, arguably, 1968, just half-a-year ago; It's not like you have to look hard for Sanders loyalists who still think Clinton's the devil. This assumption/implication that the left is all one smooth, well-oiled machine that takes marching orders from its farthest reaches is absurd, given observable reality. I don't know if it's intellectual laziness or conspiracy theorism or what, but so much of the internet-reactionary narrative on Clinton just falls apart once you acknowledge that there are divisions on the left, the centrist side tends to be the one that calls the shots, and Clinton is on that side.

ClownFundamentals · 2016-09-29T14:47:56+00:00

Man, this comment thread is really highlighting to me that a lot of SlateStarCodex readers are not like me at all. The comments on the blog reinforce that - comment after comment shrieking about emails and Benghazi and why Trump is the one man who can save us from the SJW armies. This is why liberals can't have nice things I suppose - it's just like with the race and justice posts that Scott writes. Careful critiques of leftism to keep it from being extremist, often end up being maybe 70% extremist rightists and 30% self-critical leftists.

I see this post as an excellent affirmation of the moderate case against Trump. The only thing I think it's missing is that despite all of Hillary's pandering to the left, at her core she will always be more of an Obama-style Democrat. In that sense it's not like I'm stuck voting for Bernie just to avoid Trump. The Hillary alternative is perfectly acceptable.

Put another way, amongst a hypothetical universe of all possible legitimate presidential candidates, Hillary does pretty well - to me she'd be maybe 70th percentile or so. Trump is closer to the 10th percentile. Certainly I can't think of any major presidential candidate in the last few decades that Trump is better than.

Jiro_T · 2016-09-29T09:42:27+00:00

Scott's main argument in this post seems to be describing plausible scenarios and claiming that Hillary is the better candidate based on those plausible scenarios, when the connection between "elect this candidate" and "result of scenario" is very indirect and/or involves a lot of plausible but not guaranteed steps, and ignores other plausible sounding scenarios that may produce the opposite result.

You can argue for pretty much anything that way. Yes, it's possible that electing Trump will make social justice more powerful by giving them an easier target, but it's also possible that it could make social justice less powerful for a whole host of other reasons (nobody to rally behind; changing the Overton window to the right; making it look safer to stand up to social justice; etc.) and the negative effect of giving social justice an easier target need not necessarly outweigh the positive effect of those other reasons.

remzem · 2016-09-29T07:15:35+00:00

Even Scott can't find a reason to vote for Hillary that isn't a criticism of Trump! /s

He seems really focused on the short term. No mention of SCOTUS is kind of surprising. If he wants a more moderate government and not a left leaning one you'd think that would be a big issue for him. Currently post-scalia the court is neutral to slightly left leaning. After a Hillary presidency it will likely be pretty solidly left for quite a while.

Same with his criticism of the whole protest vote, "burn it down" types. Maintaining the status quo of the system might be safer for the near future and burning it down generally leads to worse conditions short term. But we didn't get where we are by looking at the feudal serf system and thinking, yeah this is safe, let's just keep this long enough for our alchemists to discover how to turn lead into gold and magically solve all our problems.

He doesn't really seem to offer any evidence for how keeping all existing systems will help everything work out beyond ai, and genetics. It's almost like he's saying Keep all existing systems and a planet-sized ghost (in the shell?) will work everything out. Technology fixes a lot of things but it's heavily influenced by politics and people. I don't really like the idea of a hyper-intelligent ai being created by a group of increasingly authoritarian elites obsessed with identity politics.

It's a strange read for me. I do agree with a lot of his analysis and then disagree with most of his conclusions. Like his last section, I agree we'd just be replacing one evil with another, left wing vices with right wing vices, but no one is saying we're electing Trump to promote long term virtue. He's the "short-term need to neutralize immediate would-be tyrants." Does Hillary, like with a cloth or something, Clinton promote long term virtue? I'd like for us to have a long term plan too, but there doesn't seem to be any way to vote for that. Think long term though the vices of the left are new, or at least new to the west. We seem to lack the antibodies to combat them. Whereas things like racism and xenophobia are known quantities to the point that it's almost like we're over sensitive to them and do more damage than good attempting to root them out.

JustALittleGravitas · 2016-09-29T09:29:11+00:00

These arguments are heavily about style over substance. I'll be focusing on Global Warming to simplify and avoid some of the more mindkilling foreign policy shit:

Obama's 'really impressive progress' is a piece of paper with no enforcement mechanism. What actually matters is what we do moving forward. Clinton's substantive goals are to increase wind/solar to the point we have a 50% low carbon grid (note that its currently about 25% low carbon). And to, if read literally, violate the laws of thermodynamics. Read more charitably its to encourage people to buy smaller cars and insulate houses better.

This comes to about a 20% reduction in carbon. It's still terrible on a per capita basis, but it at least reduces the risk of catastrophe.

But to understand just how weak Clinton is; Trump says climate change is a hoax and he's still promising to try and do more, by promoting wind, solar and nuclear in a bid for long term 'energy independence'. The grid is 30% of a our carbon emissions, a major nuclear/renewable mixed buildout can reduce that by 90% or more, and would naturally give us transportation gains as electric cars become popular (as it it all electric cars are basically natural gas powered, there's some savings from the small size and regenerative breaking system, but power plants get turned off in the order of how much money will be saved, that means gas goes off first, then coal).

But Clinton is so terrified of saying the god-damned n-word that she won't propose we follow the path France has already proven works.

(Weirdly this issue solidly goes to Gary Johnson, since apparently I woke up in Bizzaro world and libertarians are really solid environmentalists).

LiteralHeadCannon · 2016-09-29T19:40:12+00:00

I think even people who expect Trump to be a better President on average will admit he’s a high-variance choice.

This really hit home for me. I'm still voting for Trump, but I'm a Christian who believes that, though the average Trump scenario is significantly better than the average Clinton scenario, Trump is considerably more likely than Clinton to be the Antichrist and bring about the end times.

MarkovHiding · 2016-09-30T04:38:39+00:00

Suppose you live in a swing state. If you think (in a well-calibrated way) that it’s 10% more likely that your candidate will use $1 trillion well than that the other candidate will, your vote is worth $500. If you value the amount of time it takes to vote at less than that, voting is conceivably a good use of your time.

Nearly convinced me with those numbers, but I think we have a public goods problem here. It's not worth $500 to me personally, but dispersed over the whole nation.

Epistaxis · 2016-09-29T14:29:01+00:00

TIL Scott's biggest priority in US politics is to ensure the development of specific technologies that might solve our problems, viz. genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. I don't know if it's cynicism or insufficient imagination that keeps this from resonating with me at all; it seems like the US and the First World (parts of the US might not belong in that category) still have plenty of problems that could potentially be solved by methods that are already invented. I don't know as much about the Right's offerings but on the other side there are proposals of universal health care, guaranteed basic income, carbon taxes, and free education; less politically aligned, there are also things like nuclear and renewable energy production. These are all potential solutions that we already know how to implement right now, at least well enough to give them a try and see what happens, with course corrections along the way as we work out the kinks. We don't still need years of preclinical research just to find candidate genes for editing followed by the literal human lifetimes it must take, by definition, to test the actual outcomes of human genetic engineering (to say nothing of whether our gene-editing methods are ready for primetime, but that's probably the faster part of the problem to solve). We haven't narrowed it down to problems that we can only invent our way out of.

But anyway, now that I've had my rant... on my first reading I thought he meant the need for genetic engineering was mainly for the purpose of making voters smarter so they'll make better decisions (the blunt line later about stupid Borderers ruining US politics reinforced that impression), though of course I'm sure Scott was speaking more broadly about preventing diseases and enhancing attributes that for now we can only treat and compensate for. I'm interested in the topic anyway: can someone summarize the data on whether intelligent people make better voting decisions? Obviously a lot of the challenge is to define better, in some way other than the lazy social-science claim of "hey you guys I finally figured out the pathology that causes decent smart people to become afflicted with conservative political beliefs!", but also you'd have to separate it from the inevitable counterarguments (educated Americans lean left but maybe the education system inculcates leftist ideology). I think SSC readers of every stripe are all too well aware that some very smart people can have some very silly (but elaborate!) political views.

imitationcheese · 2016-09-29T11:30:37+00:00

I appreciate his nuance on swing states by endorsing Clinton there but think it's an intellectually weak argument to not go further. States and Election Day matter, but they matter as the culmination of a process that is a national discourse over media and social media and in-person conversations during the lead up. And I actually think the marginal power of productively engaging in this discourse during the lead up is more than the marginal power of a vote.*

If Frank in Alabama read this endorsement and votes Johnson, that sounds fine right? Wrong. He was actually very vocal with his Facebook friends, with other Alabamans who also speak to their Facebook friends, many of whom live in swing states. They share many anti-Clinton memes, pro-Johnson stories, etc. They do this for weeks and the aggregate of Franks and their friends who post like this might affect numerous opinions, voting plans, and turnout. This is more powerful than 1 vote. It's the impact of people who engage in discourse beforehand, and SSC trivializes this by not endorsing Clinton.

On Election Day, vote as SSC says. But vocally beforehand, we should all be very pro-Clinton.*

(I shouldn't have to explain here that this is reality speaking, the voting math speaking, and not a pure love of Clinton or a desire for her to achieve power without having a mobilized group pressuring/pushing back against her.)

*Unless you're obnoxious and everyone who hears you wants to do the opposite. Then Trump, Stein, Johnson is fine.

75thTrombone · 2016-09-29T21:27:35+00:00

Interesting /r/slatestarcodex fact: Every use of the word "nuclear" so far in this thread is about nuclear energy, and not about the 50% chance that a man who is eager to use nukes and doesn't understand nuclear deterrence will spend four years being followed around by the big red button

bigstrat2003 · 2016-09-29T06:11:47+00:00

I don't know that I'm going to vote, but if I do it will be for a third party (which one is currently TBD). I think both Trump and Hillary will be awful presidents as neither gives a flying fuck about civil liberties (which is the issue that matters - if we aren't free, nothing else is important). So voting for either of them is obviously out.

And since the American electorate is depressingly insistent on tactically voting rather than voting for who the fuck they want to win, it's always a frustrating exercise in futility being a third-party voter (which is why I gave up on voting years ago), but both the mainstream candidates are widely hated. So, if there is ever a chance of having a third-party candidate make headways in my lifetime, it'll be this year. That's the only real reason I'm contemplating voting - I have no hope of getting a good president in office, but I have small hope that it's possible for a third-party candidate to get enough votes to make a dent in our culture's subscription to the lie of "a third party vote is a wasted vote". But even then, it probably won't happen... so I don't know that I'm going to bother. We'll see.

Why yes, I am completely disillusioned with US politics and think that there is no chance of it ever being fixed... why do you ask? :P

Not related so much to the "who will you vote for" question, but I am seriously not looking forward to the next four years of life in this country. Since we are guaranteed to have an awful president who doesn't care about our freedoms no matter what, I can only imagine what bold new outrages will be perpetrated by the next president. And there isn't a damn thing any of us can do about it, besides fleeing the country to not have to live with it (which is a hard life change to make). Bleh.

Swag_Bro_420 · 2016-09-29T08:45:50+00:00

[Epistemic status: biased speculation about complex and difficult to predict future events and societal trends]

Not that an argument by a Trump supporter about why Hillary is riskier wouldn't also be biased. But Scott usually shows more epistemic humility.

bringsthebantz · 2016-09-29T04:57:06+00:00

I live in a swing state.

I was undecided between Johnson and Trump when I woke up this morning (for the post history creepers, yes I post on the_donald. It's fun- stupid fun, but fun).

After reading this, I'm ready to vote for Trump. You did it, Scott, you've persuaded me.

30% of Americans are dumb scotch Irish hicks

And I'm a dumb scotch Irish hick with a PhD. And because of where I'm from (and the accent I obtained there) I can't ever expect to be treated like a human being anywhere in the urban northeast or in he Bay Area. People will ask me if we have running water where I'm from or whether we hang our n****rs in the front yard or the back yard. It seems to be beyond their comprehension that maybe I'm a civilized person.

20+ years of education and dozens of published papers and I'm still a subhuman to you people.

Time to hit back.

how is the absurd ethnic tension scenario different from now?

It isn't. That's the point. As you should understand well from your article on reactionary philosophy, "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

Time to hit back.

Trump might start a war

I actually agree with you on this one. I also see it as a virtual guarantee that Clinton would as well. I wish this wasn't the case, but our military is going to kill a bunch of innocent Arabs in the next few years.

Given that it's going to happen, we might as well make a profit off it. Take the oil.

And you know what else? Inviting the people whose kin we've killed into our country is a recipe for disaster, not to mention morally absurd. We could stop bombing Syria if we want the moral high ground- it isn't the high ground that Clinton and her people want. They want to stir up EVEN MORE ethnic conflict to win cheap votes at our expense (and the Syrians expense too).

Time to hit back.

if the first woman president fails, the SJWs will see the error in their ways

Just like they realized their mistake when racial tensions got worse and not better under Obama? Submission to the authoritarian left won't help the right make headway in the culture wars.

Time to hit back.

Trump will be bad from a global warming standpoint

We've already gone over the cliff. Reducing emissions could help make the cliff smaller, but we're already airborne. You know what's already happening as a result? The great migrations from hot, dry, underdeveloped regions (Latin America or MENA) to cooler, wetter, more developed regions (like the eastern USA and Europe).

When our crops fail (as they're already beginning to do) and our infrastructure cannot adapt to the new normal (also already happening), and our institutions become gridlocked in ethnic conflict (been going on for a long time already), there's something that would really help us prevent making these problems even worse: a big fucking wall.

Trump actually is a bigoted Troglodyte

Maybe. This is my last doubt regarding his candidacy. He definitely matches the "deplorables" in their emotional tone.

But remember Romney's policy for paid maternal leave? Me neither. What about the speeches at the 2012 RNC about the gender pay gap? Me neither. Or how about how Romney's "binders full of women" we're actually paid more than the men on average? Me neither. So on gender issues, Trump is objectively more progressive than establishment republicans. He just also says sexist things that they would never say.

Racial issues are where I do legitimately doubt his good intentions. But I do have to say this- if I were to go on a propaganda mission to persuade rednecks to be more progressive, my first step would be to validate them and gain their trust so that they'd be susceptible to my influence. At this stage in the game, I'd look just like Trump.

in_nomine · 2016-09-29T22:02:45+00:00

I congratulate Scott for knowing his audience, I really think that if anything is going to dissuade from voting Trump is something along those lines. However I don't think he understands how much I want to hurt them. Everything can go to hell as long as Amanda Marcotte wakes up after the elections and feels totally defeated and crestfallen.

tankiegirl · 2016-09-29T03:35:58+00:00

Many conservatives make the argument against utopianism. The millenarian longing for a world where all systems are destroyed, all problems are solved, and everything is permissible – that’s dangerous whether it comes from Puritans or Communists. These same conservatives have traced this longing through leftist history from Lenin through social justice.

Communists like Lenin very specifically weren't utopians, as argued in some of his most famous pieces:

To carry on a war for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie, a war which is a hundred times more difficult, protracted and complex than the most stubborn of ordinary wars between states, and to renounce in advance any change of tack, or any utilisation of a conflict of interests (even if temporary) among one’s enemies, or any conciliation or compromise with possible allies (even if they are temporary, unstable, vacillating or conditional allies)—is that not ridiculous in the extreme? Is it not like making a difficult ascent of an unexplored and hitherto inaccessible mountain and refusing in advance ever to move in zigzags, ever to retrace one’s steps, or ever to abandon a course once selected, and to try others?

-Lenin, in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Scott Alexander really needs to find a better intro to Marxism, btw. Stuff like this makes me increasingly realise he doesn't really read outside of his own ingroup.

“Don’t destroy all existing systems and hope a planet-sized ghost makes everything work out”.

I wonder if he would accept this kind of strawman in any other context but anti-communism? Can he find any Marxist arguing that the "planet-sized ghost makes everything work out"?

One more warning for conservatives who still aren’t convinced. If the next generation is radicalized by Trump being a bad president, they’re not just going to lean left. They’re going to lean regressive, totalitarian, super-social-justice left.

I'm not entirely convinced that this is true. The rise of "social justice" types has been within the last 8 years. Also, most of them are pretty harmless and liberal. Speaking of my own politics, I became Marxist-Leninist after the global financial crisis and after I realised that the Democratic party wasn't really so different to the Republicans.

Stlrpaoyj · 2016-09-29T21:43:33+00:00

Yeah, I'm not going to even waste my time attempting to position this in any sort of intellectual way: I'm voting Trump because all the leftists I know in my life have become assholes over the last four years. Mean, spiteful, hateful, bullying, threatening assholes. I'll support literally anything, anyone, any stance, anything that will insert additional unhappiness into their lives. Don't care. The GOP could introduce a bill suggesting we kill all the zebras, and if it sent all the leftists I know into tizzies of volcanic rage, I'd support it. Only issue that matters to me anymore. (Oh, and by the way, this is coming from someone who voted for Gore, Kerry, and Obama twice, and straight ticket Dem in every midterm election until 2010.)

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